Professor James Ijames and Rachel Chavkin '08 Team Up for World Premiere of 'Welcome Table' at The Public Theater
Concentration Head of Playwriting and Associate Professor James Ijames's newest play, Welcome Table, directed by Theatre alum Rachel Chavkin '08, will premiere at The Public Theater this winter. Running from February 18 to March 14, 2027, Welcome Table dramatizes an infamous encounter between writer James Baldwin and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
In the spring of 1963, Baldwin sent Kennedy a telegram blaming the Kennedy administration for the nationwide violence in response to the Civil Rights Movement, to which Kennedy suggested they organize an in-person conversation now referred to as “the Baldwin-Kennedy meeting,” in which Baldwin organized a delegation of Black thinkers, artists, and activists—the group included playwright Lorraine Hansberry, singers Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, Freedom Rider Jerome Smith, and psychologist Kenneth Clark, among many others—to come together to envision a means to a kinder, more harmonious America.
On a Zoom call last week, Ijames said the inspiration for this play came, in part, from gaps in his own knowledge of Black history in America. “I had a family that tried to teach me everything they could about Black history, and this moment was like a hole…when I read the list of folks who were there, I was like, ‘Well, this is captivating. This is interesting. What story can be told out of this?’” In figuring out how to dramatize this historical account, Ijames turned towards the work of Columbia Professor of English and Comparative Literature Saidiya V Hartman, specifically her notion of Critical Fabulation. “I enjoy the imaginative practice of thinking about history because so much of my history, or the history of my people, is fractured. It is actively being erased in this moment, and so trying to be a steward and holding on to those stories suddenly becomes very, very important to me. This play suddenly feels like it's dropping in the world at the exact moment that I feel like the world needs it.”
“My first reaction was to the character page,” Chavkin said on the same Zoom call. “From the very first words, I was really swept away into this plane of recreation…All plays have opportunities for acting, but there is an invitation to technical skills and to emotional skills in this play, and our evolving company has been filled with people who carry these characters and are advocating for these characters.”
Both Ijames and Chavkin were aligned in a mutual feeling that working on this project allowed them to gain an insight into the personhood of all of these characters beyond their historical and public personas. “I try to be a disciple of James Baldwin. I really do think of him as a North Star...Hansberry as well, but it was also just a room of people,” Ijames said. Or as Chavkin put it: “The beauty of what James is writing is the human scale of these people who we now know only primarily as icons. By writing about them, you get to be in the room with these people who are also small as well as epic, and that is, I would say, the biggest learning of the play for me. The human, the tiny, tiny human nuance and detail and imperfections of these people that are present throughout.”
James Ijames is a Pulitzer Prize-winning and Tony Award-nominated playwright, director, former actor, and educator. Ijames’s work has been produced by The Public Theater, Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater, Steppenwolf Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, JACK, The National Black Theatre, and Hudson Valley Shakespeare Theater, among others. Ijames won the 2011 F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Philadelphia Artist presented by Theatre Philadelphia. He served as a co-Artistic director for the 2021–22 season of The Wilma Theater and joined Columbia School of the Arts faculty as head of Playwriting in 2025.
Rachel Chavkin is a director, writer, and co-artistic director of Brooklyn-based experimental collective the TEAM. In 2019, she received the Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Director of a Musical for Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown. Chavkin is a three-time Obie winner and received additional Tony and Lortel nominations and a Drama Desk Award for her direction of Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 in 2017. In addition to her work on Broadway, she’s worked on productions at New York Theatre Workshop, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Lincoln Center, and HERE Arts. Her most recent productions include Lempicka on Broadway, My Joy Is Heavy at New York Theatre Workshop, and the world premiere of Eugene Onegin: A Bluegrass Musical at TheatreSquared in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Read more about Welcome Table here.